My early testing with SFM (mostly in a UW Midrange shell a la Cawblade or Legacy UW Stoneblade) seems to indicate that the card is balanced in Modern, at least against fair decks and more controlling decks. Jund often had enough removal to kill SFM first, Batterskull later, and every single Sword carrier for dessert. Mono-G Tron needed to get disrupted (often at least twice) or it ran over Team SFM's board state regardless of SFM. Whirza often forced through its infinite combo (Thopter-Sword-Urza) through disruption, and it could always lean on trying to force through Ensnaring Bridge as a back-up plan. I'm not optimistic that SFM will perform any better against combo than Goyf already does because the life gain rarely matters and SFM delays itself for a turn trying to reach Goyf size. I built a Saheeli Copycat Snowblade deck in the process, and initial testing of that one is promising, but it has a larger weakness to combo. (One thing that makes me optimistic about Copycat Snowblade is that it mirrors the Twinblade decks of yore, and already Jund felt the pinch between breaking up the combo and nuking Batterskull once in testing.)

Of course, SFM is likely going to try its best to warp the Burn, Mono-Red Prowess, and UWx Control match-ups in its favour. I should try these match-ups next.

I'm now more confident that more optimal Modern SFM shells need more creatures (or at least more Lingering Souls) to make any Swords tutored for worth a card. Even the vaunted Sword of Fire and Ice was often worse than Batterskull (though I think SoFaI is the better choice against combo because of the card draw and similar clock speed-up).

I agree, after playing in MTGO since Monday with and against SFM it doesn't seem to make any current deck better, if anything it will give UW control the batterskull they need to survive vs burn and dredge, but for other mid range decks dealing with it is easy.

The words seem still very slow:
Turn 1.- discard or cantrip
Turn 2.- SFM
turn 3.- Before your 4th turn put a sword into play
turn 4.- equip sword, attack, opponent plays path to exile in response to equipping. You invested 6 mana with no payoff to speak for.

Nevertheless there is an infect deck running sigarda's aid and SFM to tutor for the big hammer and kill you in turn 3, and can pull some tricks.

Banning Looting is the final nail in the coffin of Modern. Hitting a wide swath of decks because people want less combo decks is dumb as hell. Modern will become a wasteland like Standard where 3-4 decks take control of the meta and nothing else will stand a chance. Expect a huge Tron revival now.

That's the plan and then BAN the Tron lands, and everyone will live happy ever after

IMHO it seems an emergency ban is required, other decks were running 6-8 hate pieces and it wasn't enough. With the last two modern GP's of the year in just 2 weeks I wonder if WotC wants to see the events being so warped around hogaak.

I think it is a fundamentally wrong question. We know that Wizards designs only with Standard in mind and not Modern.

In every set there will be cards fitting all archetypes (i.e. aggro, midrange, control). From this cards, it follows that at some point there will be printings powerful enough to slot into decks of that type in eternal formats.

Further, there will be cards that are "fun" designs, but that can be broken in card pools as large as modern.

I don't think it's either a personal or a design bias. It is literally how magic is designed. If anything, we know that in the last decade or so Wizards would like to have a more creature focused environment, without pushing spells completely out of the way. Even in this environment, however, we still get tools for all and any deck. Quantifying and qualifying them doesn't really show anything about design intention.

If anything, it shows that the design team can still come up with unique and powerful card designs that have play even in eternal formats and can compete with old, broken spells. That's something we should compliment the design team for and not bash them, as they often get way too much flack.

Well Horizons actually ended this restriction and we are now in a different world.

That being said, they for sure don't design for legacy or vintage because narset, parter of veils and t3feri wouldn't have happened.

That is good to know on the forums. I have been on here for some time trying to get info on various decks.

That being said, Discord? I would love to have some access to that. I didn't see the info on the main page. Is it somewhere else?

I'd love to see the discussion on Sephara, I thought mainly cause you can get her out for much less than CMC on most occasions, that she makes other tokens indestructible, is a foil to Burn (takes at least three spells to kill), and seems to be immune to lots of common removal in the format. In, fact, I was trying to wrack my brain on what might be good against it, considering things like Maelstrom Pulse, Assassin's Trophy, etc. Even sacrifice effects are not really good, assuming you have tapped 4 to make her in the first place. Would love to see that discussion.

The problem with the card isn't what is good against it, as you correctly pointed out of the common removal in modern only 3 cards hit her: path, trophy and pulse. But what actually does the angel improve for us?

The angel could help in matches that are already quite good for us: burn, gds, and dredge (they will have a hell of a time removing her). It is a win more card there.

Vs The rock it dies, but it is already a good matchup.

Maybe vs phoenix but you run the risk of being bounced by TiTi.

In humans and spirits is going to be bounced by reflector mage and left you wide open to attack after tapping your stuff.

I feel it is big and flashy but ends up being a trap. A turn 4 sorin seems more relevant.

Hey guys, I'm new here. I've played the deck a long time ago and trying to catch up to the meta.

As I see it, this deck has its best cards in the 1 drop and 4 drop. It has pretty much the best removals in fatal push and path to exile, which are important to keeping the deck alive to employ its late game win cons. It's actually ridiculous how many great planeswalkers are in black and white, arguably many of the best are in this color like the new Serra, Sorin SV, Gideon AZ, etc. It's honestly tempting to just go full out control rather than having half the deck dedicated to a midrange token strategy.

While the 3-drops like Lingering Souls are insanely good, it seems in general the 2-3 cmc cards are where this deck loses a lot of momentum. Let's look at some of the cards:

History of Benalia - not sure how I feel about this, ranges from bad to good

Raise the Alarm - can range from meh to very good but very good when the deck needs an aggro pressure and can double as removal

Liliana - can range from meh to very good. I've ran fetid heath to cast this more easily. The key is its versatility as it is 80% of the time going to put some kind of pressure on your opponent.

Bitterblossom - either really good or really bad. No in between. The card is absurdly slow unless it's played on turn 2. Drawing it late sucks.

Auriok Champion - I'm not entirely sure how good it is in the meta. If someone can chime in, that would be appreciated. This thing would be consistently good if the deck had access to Stoneforge Mystic.

Kaya's Guile - versatile but the deck has such a high mana curve already. It also already has access to the best removal spells. To me, this is overkill and not nearly as versatile as something like K-command to justify playing.

Hidden Stockpile - has been very bad for me, I question why people play it. It's just too slow most of the time. But I would love to hear counterarguments.

Legion's Landing - I've only been able to test this a couple times. Being able to serve as a land later on seems like it would help enable a heavier PW oriented strategy.

The card choices come down to your local meta, mine is very heavy on UW control, dredge, GDS and rock/jund and that explains my choices

Bitterblossom, it is simply amazing vs any kind of control (except whirr prison), they can't keep up with the constant flow of creatures.

Auriok Champion, it is great vs dredge, gds, rock and burn, can win those games almost on her own.

Hidden Stockpile, I agree with you on this one, it is only real useful in long matches and at that point I would better pack a card for that that actually is great for grindy matches (In my case Liliana, dreadhorde general). Stockiple can filter but doesn't draw, sometime it is akward if you can't activate it. The only thing going for it is that it shines in multiples. For actual drawing I prefer Smuggler's copter

Legion's landing, the up of this card is transforming it in turn 3 to get to 4 mana fast but this actually doesn't happen that often, and then you have to keep investing 4 mana each turn to make a token, in that sense stockpile is actually better because it can produce the token for free.

Kaya's guile, I haven't tested this, at first sight it seems cool to have a versatile card that would help in different matchups, the problem is the cost, it is just to expensive as an answer (we have access to card that do anything this card does cheaper and better). But I am open to give it a chance to see if versatility can go over pure "value".

IMHO raise the alarm is a card that shines is agro builds, History kind of similar.